SE Asia



Have you ever seen a 40 foot wave? They look like they are about a hundred feet, in real life.

What wonderful timing, too. I hope the UN can get it's sh-- together without 50 resolutions and help out.

A tsunami isn't a normal wave, either...it's more like a tidal surge than a breaking wave. A 40-foot tidal surge is mammoth, particularly if it hits at high tide.

And that death toll is far too small, I'm sure. It's going to go way up as the day progresses.

Biblical proportions. In a week, the disease factor will begin to kill thousands more.

The Richter scale is a logoramithic. 8.9 is brutal. Chances are good, it will trigger more.

Wow, that's incredible. The LA times this morning had it at a 8.5 with I think 400 deaths. This on the heels of a 8.1 off the southern coast of Australia a couple of days ago. Scary stuff, living here in southern California.

Wow, I had never heard that (the logoramithic part). That is nuts.

If you take a look at the USGS quake center site, it's already generated eighteen aftershocks magnitude 5.8 or above...major quakes in their own right. Some of them are several hundred miles from the original epicenter.

I just started hearing an hour ago that Phucat, Thailand had their coastline devastated. That's a resort town...and they've "only" had "a hundred" deaths. Yeah, right...maybe natives. Don't know how long it's going to take them to count the missing tourists.

And the western south coast of Sumatra, as far as I know, is still out of communication with the outside world. Fotunately there wasn't a lot there to begin with...

It goes by powers of 10: every point on the scale is an increase in power of 10. Therefore, an 8.7 is actually a thousand times more powerful than a 5.7. A 10.0 is theoretically impossible; from what I understand, the earth's crust couldn't absorb the shock, and it would basically rip the planet in half.

this 8.7 supposedly altered the earths rotation

It looks as though it's been upgraded to a 9.0 magnitude.

And like I said earlier...the death toll's up to 12000. Of course, if you add the individual estimates from each country, that total's about 14k. And a lot of places that were devastated by the wave were tourist areas...on a holiday weekend, no less. There could be a LOT of foreign vacationers unaccounted for. I figured this morning it would get up to about 20k.

And not to be a filthy capitalist...but I wonder what this is going to do to the US markets in the morning...this is a huge blow to economies that aren't all that strong or large to begin with.

Get in early.

All I wanna know is, what will it do to my weather?... Will it stay cold or will we have an early spring?

I think that the fact that this wave hit so early in the morning on a sunday, the death toll will be much higher then if it were in the middle of the day and people would have had some warning.


I just wonder how long it will be until algore holds a press conference and calls for GWB's impeachment for not supporting the kyoto treaty and therefore being the direct cause of all natural castastorphies in the past 4 years, and for the next 4 years.

There have been several aftershocks an hour in the high 5 and low 6 magnitude rage. This was a doozy!

Good points... Why don't we just start the impeachment proceedings first thing tommorrow? Glad to get you onboard!

And some of them several hundred miles away from the epicenter of the original quake. This quake really !@#$ed up that fault line something serious.

There's no warning system for the Indian Ocean area. None whatsoever. The USGS actually tried to get a warning out...in NO country on the Indian Ocean could they even identify someone to contact.



You're an idiot.

Wow! That is just too bad... We could have at least moved all the PETA people into proper position...

A big part of the reason is simply because tsunami aren't that common in the Indian Ocean. The Pacific rim needs such a system, considering that in any given year there's a very good chance of a severe earthquake somewhere in the Pacific. The Indian Ocean countries never saw any significant need for such a system to track and warn of a seriously rare event such as this (probably happens once every several centuries at its most frequent...compared to every couple decades in Hawaii or Japan or such).

I think they'll probably be rethinking that, particularly the resort communities, and particularly since a country doesn't need to maintain its own geological service to monitor everything; realistically, a procedure for getting info from the USGS and getting it to the coast rapidly in a possible emergency would have saved a lot of lives today.


And I still haven't heard anything about the western coast of Sumatra. I know the quake itself did serious damage on the island, but the coast must have been scoured. Typically, when Indonesia has tidal waves like this, whole coastal towns disappear without a trace.

Yeah...why should they "build their own" when they can rely on the good ole USA to help save their ass? You know the "terrible" USA that they "hate" so much, that oh by the way ALREADY has sent aid and services. Wonder how much France, Germany, Spain and the rest of New Europe has sent so far.

Quite a bit, actually. A LOT of European tourists are still unaccounted for.

And you really expect Bangladesh to start their own earthquake and tsunami monitoring service? With what? Don't be stupid...the inconvenience a warning system that allows the USGS to call someone with authority in Bangladesh is so pitifully small that the only possible reason for your mindless rant is nothing more than pettiness.

Rail all you want. Fact is that the USA sends more in aid to these shitholes around the world than any other country combined. And when disaster strikes, the USA is the FIRST country to open the checkbook. And more, those countries almost DEMAND the US fork up billions in aid. But as soon as the check is cashed, those "poor downtrodden" around the world, and New Europe continue the orgy of stevestojan about how "bad" the USA is.

In short, they take our money, our aid, and everything we got, and then spit right in our eyes.

Petty? You can call it that. But if asking that all the GOOD we do be acknowledged once in a while is "mindless", then so be it.

So it's okay for 20k people to die because they don't kiss our collective asses? Nice attitude, that...remind me, if I ever see you pinned in a burning car, not to stop and help, as you don't kiss my ass.

I never said they should "kiss our asses".

But it would be nice if they didnt take our offerings and then sh-- on us the second they walk out of the room. Would be nice if the good we do was simply RECOGNIZED for a change.

Some dumb soldier puts a hood on a POW and its all the news and rage around the world. But we give BILLIONS in aid overnight to disaster relief and billions more to other causes and its treated like it never hapenned.

Oh, okay. We shouldn't give them aid because of the actions of a few idiots in Abu Ghraib.

In ten years, add in 'the death of 5,000 soldiers' and this will be an apt description of Iraq.

We don't have flooding and droughts in Texas, energy crisis in California, wildfires in the West, hurricanes in the East that should take precedence over sending billions overseas to feed people who will be killing us tomorrow for our generosity?

I just read that they were surfing 40' waves off of Hawaii on the 15th... Would this have been any indication of imminent seismic activity?

???

again, the sensativity on this board is astounding. First, the 22,000 body count will be conservative compared to the numbers in a few weeks after the debris is cleared, the missing are accounted for, and disease takes hold.

Also, about U.S. aid - conservatives always say that "we give more than anyone, they should appreciate it!" well, for the largest economy in the history of the world, as a percentage we give crap!

Also, contributing to the disaster in Asia as a result of the Tsunami is in our economic and security interest. It would be strategic to give and help as much as we can in an area where Al Qaeda and others are operating. It would complicate thier anti-U.S. messege by mass devotion of resources, both to this disaster. I am not sure I have seen a disaster like this in my lifetime.

No. Because of the long fetch over the Pacific, parts of Hawaii gets 40' waves as a matter of routine.

And there's a difference between a 'wave' and a 'tsunami', anyway. When waves come ashore, they break. Tsunami, on the other hand, basically look like the entire ocean moving on to shore as a single large mass...hence the term "tidal wave".

Thanks!

On inland lakes (ie: Great lakes) they are called seiche or slosh. Sometime ago I mentioned how parts of where the Aud is today was put under 10' of water from one such event in the 1800's (before construction of the inner and outter breakwaters at Buffalo Harbor). That event actually swept people out of their beds... That area, a predominantly poor harbor district with many shanty dwellings.

I know this sounds crazy...

My previous post mentioned inland seiche or slosh which was easily remedied by breakwaters.

I know the ocean is a much larger scale and cost would be tremendous... Also looks wouldn't be that great.

Would it not be possible to protect the highest population areas and historic tsunami "hot spots" with some sort of engineering?

It can't possibly cost as much as the damage and aid being sent there?

Then again... That 80' high breakwater might look kinda crappy while you were sitting out on the beach?

What causes "slosh" in a lake? I've never heard of it. Is it atmospheric, like a storm surge from a hurricane, where the wind just pushes the water ahead of it?

Engineering against tsunami might be possible...the problem is that the waves themselves are so massive that I don't really know that modern engineering is up to the task. Considering some of the damage from the "Perfect Storm" nor'easter, where the waves (which were just swells) crushed some fairly massive breakwaters, a moderately sized tsunami is probably going to wreck anything you put in front of it. Tsunamis usually pack a lot more power than regular ocean waves.

Atmospheric... Strong sustained winds that push the water... Sudden pressure changes... Usually a strong low crossing over the lakes.



Here is a simple explaination (U of Wisconsin):

Seiche/Slosh

Refresh it to see it move...

I also gleaned this:

Believe it or not, rivers do not always flow downstream! Seiche action on Lake Erie, for example, can actually cause the Detroit River to flow north! While unusual, this does occasionally happen. A seiche is a standing wave caused by winds and/or changing barometric pressures, which pile water up at one end of a lake while drawing it down on the other. An everyday analogy is the way in which water in a bathtub sloshes back and forth when a person gets in at one end. On October 16, 2001, a storm-produced seiche resulted in water level changes of 6.5 feet at the western end of Lake Erie over a six hour period!

Before coming here I worked in hydrographic survey (Soundings and survey for material removal) thoughout the western lakes. Not necessarily storm driven but, when working in the western basin of Lake Erie (Toldeo) we would have to check our gages frequently... Later on they had them update every minute... You could leave shore with a gage reading and get some distance out... Things would have changed dramatically... Our soundings calibrated to that inaccurate gage reading would then be messed up!

Where I work now you can see what happens from wind driven results. Our upper pool is Lake Michigan... We get a stiff north wind blowing down the entire N-S fetch of Lake Michigan and the water really piles up above us (even know we are 7 miles from the harbor (technically not the mouth, since the river is reversed)). It is not uncommon to see our upper pool gage readings jump a foot or two!

You could do a Vegas Show with that. Open up for Wayne Newton?

Interesting. Also a completely different effect, I think. Tsunami, in the open ocean, are long-wavelength small-amplitude waves that move (500 mph is about typical, with a crest-to-trough height of maybe a foot and a wavelength of miles.) It's the wavelength and speed that makes them so dangerous: the long wavelength insures a lot of water involved, and the speed insures that, when the wave hits the shallows and starts to build up, that water's moving. I don't think you can get that effect from a wind-driven surge, since it's fundamentally a surface effect. Seiche might be bad, but it's to a degree limited in that it fundamentally can't involve the depths of a body of water they way tsunami can.

Of course, I'm not a hydrographer. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night... (And, of course, I'm doing back-of-the-envelope physics calculations as I type...but that's just me.)

I choose my words wisely with you guys...

Exactly.

I also stayed at a Holiday Inn Express (they had google! ).

I bet in early times, without accurate forecasting it might have caused a big problem... now it still might lead to some property damage.

Here... I found something that a seiche at sea might counteract a tsunami:

In simple terms, what is a seiche? Could a seiche counteract the forward energy of a tsunami? How do you pronounce "seiche"?

Every enclosed body of water has a number of natural resonances. If you sit in a bathtub part full of water and rock back and forth you'll find that at the right period (about a second) you can easily get the waves to grow until they overflow the bath. The resonant oscillation of the water is a seiche. Seiches are often generated in swimming pools by small oscillations from earthquakes - the oscillations happen to be at the right frequency for the swimming pools to "catch" them. During the Northridge earthquake of 1994, swimming pools all over Southern California overflowed. During the great Alaska earthquake of 1964, swimming pools as far away as Puerto Rico were set into oscillation!
Tsunamis generate seiches too, although we usually do not consider them as seiches. The predominant period of the tsunami that hit Hawaii in 1946 was fifteen minutes. The natural resonant period of Hilo Bay is about half-an-hour. That meant that every second wave was in phase with the motion of Hilo Bay so that the sloshing of the bay built up. We usually think of the damage to Hilo in 1946 as being simply from the tsunami, but it was really a combination of the tsunami and a tsunami-generated seiche.
Could a seiche counteract a tsunami? I assume here you are asking if a seiche generated by seismic waves could counteract any tsunami generated by the earthquake. Interesting idea! I'm afraid the answer is "no," for two reasons. The first reason is timing. On the deep ocean, tsunamis travel about 800 km/hour (500 mph). That's about 0.2 km/s. Earthquake waves travel much faster, say 8 km/s (i.e., forty times faster). Any seiche excited by earthquake waves will have died down before the tsunami arrives. The second reason is frequency of oscillation. Earthquake waves tend to have most of their energy at periods (the time from one wave crest to the next) of ten seconds to a few minutes. Tsunamis tend to have periods of five minutes to as much as an hour. So a seiche excited by earthquake waves would be at too high a frequency to interact with the tsunami.
How do you pronounce "seiche?" Sigh-shh. The word was introduced to science by the Swiss seismologist F.A. Forel in 1890. The word had apparently long been used in the German-speaking part of Switzerland to describe oscillations in alpine lakes.

Dr. Gerard Fryer
Hawaii Inst. of Geophysics & Planetology
University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822

Well, it at least supports what I said: seiches and tsunami are two completely different phenomenon with vastly different structures (simply by the difference in speeds), and thus can't really be compared.

It also explains why the Hilo tsunami in '46 was such a bad one: the bay is the perfect size to amplify the tsunami wave train as it comes in. When Hilo gets hit with tsunami, they usually get hit bad. In fact, the '46 Hilo tsunami was one of the motivations for setting up the Pacific Rim warning system, as I recall.

I understand... I wasn't really trying to say they were both the same... Just the closest event on enclosed waters. Like the event that happened early on in Buffalo... It had to be a shock? Then again, shabbily constructed areas will always come back to bite you in the arse when a nasty natural event takes place!

boy did i get in on this thread late...
my father seems to have got out just in time along with a whole conference of earthquake engineering researchers as there was an earthquake conference in thailand last week
he's perfectly safe now, but i can't get him on the phone to talk about it now as he has alot of work to do now

I have some dear friends in Chennai (Madras) who live right by the water. I have not been able to get a hold of them and am really worried. Please keep them in your thoughts/prayers.

This is a real disaster that is affecting real people. Let's hope that as many people are helped as possible, in every way possible.

Death toll at 44,000 now. Damn.

Wait until the e. coli kicks in.

Actually, at 50k now. Apparently, entire towns on the western shore of Sumatra are just gone, including one of 10k people.

The economies of the region are going to take years, if not decades, to recover from this.

Ocean front property now available for pennies on the dollar.

I forgot my friend from high school went to Phuket for Christmas
quite a narrow escape for him and his family

from his blog


Sunday, December 26, 2004
7:47 AM


So today my family and I went out on a boat to visit Phiphi island, a tourist spot off the coast of Phuket. After an hour boat ride, we arrived but couldn't land because of turbulent waves, supposedly caused by some earthquake. We didn't think much of it...although there was debris around the coast and the place looked a little run down, it didn't look like there had been a lot of damage. If anything, we were more concerned that we had wasted an hour riding out there and would now have to turn back. It turns out that Phiphi island had been wiped out by an earthquake in Indonesia, resulting in over 200 people killed on the island itself and scores dead or missing on the main island of Phuket. Apparently the tidal waves hit both islands while we were on route to Phiphi...as we arrived back in Phuket I saw an ugly scene of capsized boats and wrecked piers. If the waves hit as we were leaving Phuket or while we were on Phiphi, we could have been wiped out. Instead, we were hardly affected since we were out at sea at the time, too far out for tidal waves to form. What timing. People on the beach of Phuket were swept away...the beachside restaurant where we ate xmas eve dinner isn't there anymore. Anyway, we ended up having to wait four hours to get home because roads were flooded...a small price to pay for narrowly escaping death. Thank you God for looking out for my family and I.

Any news on your friends yet?

No, still trying every night. Thanks for asking, though.

Over 80,000 now.